1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data processing device for transferring a print data from an application to a printer via a printer driver, a print setting processing method, a storage device for storing a computer-readable program and the program.
2. Related Background Art
Conventionally, when an application running on a computer performs a printing, a typical method is that the application passes as parameters various types of settings required for the printing to a print-related processing program such as a printer driver.
In this manner, by passing as the parameters the various types of settings required for the printing from the program to the printer driver, the printout intended by the program can be obtained (e.g. refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-328757).
This patent document describes discriminating whether the settings conflict at function setting, controlling graying of a setting item such that the setting item cannot be selected and displaying a message indicating that the setting item cannot be selected. However, setting types that can be specified to obtain the intended printout is within very limited range such as so-called specification of paper supply port and specification of duplex/simplex print which are considered to be supported by any printer, and for other useful functions which cannot be directly specified by an application program, it was required to open a user interface of the printer driver to specify the function.
Therefore, for printout from various types of system software in a company, a problem occurs that a printer or a printer driver function is fully used if it is not desired to display a user interface of the printer driver.
Therefore, a printer driver is recently emerging that allows a printer or printer driver type dependent setting to be equally set as a printer driver user interface by providing and using a special interface available from an application so as to make full use of the printer or the printer driver.
Such special interface may be used in a printer driver having an extended function in a plug-in form.
The functional extension of the printer driver in the plug-in form is a method of providing an additional function by providing a differential module or a plug-in aside from a printer driver install set distributed from a printer vendor.
In this situation, in changing a function setting extended by the plug-in using the special interface from the application, the printer driver may return a notification indicating that a modification of the setting cannot be performed if a conflict with other print setting occurs.
For example, assume that the conflict setting combination is a booklet print function and a duplex print function which are the extension functions.
Then, if the duplex print function is enabled, performing a setting modification process for enabling the booklet print function using the interface from the application causes the printer driver to return to the application the notification indicating that the setting modification cannot be performed.
In this situation, because the application side cannot recognize which print settings conflict, the desired print settings cannot be performed.